During the early industrial revolution, machines were integrated into the work environment to speed up the manufacturing of goods. The utilization of machines allowed production numbers to increase well beyond what human labor alone would allow. This caused an exponential growth period for most companies as the drastically lower price of goods initiated by the lower cost of production increased sales dramatically. Soon, most manufacturers were racing to have their factories “modernized” as well. For some of the manufacturers, simple steam driven power sources utilizing leather belts enabled them to increase production and minimize human labor. However, a great deal of the manufacturing still required great dexterity and, thus, human labor remained invaluable for those types of processes.
Eventually, more complex manufacturing machines were created to perform intricate tasks but required complex control systems to operate. These were burdensome to maintain and control, but they gave their owners the ability to replace tedious human labor with more efficient machines. The complexity of the controls eventually drove the manufacturers to employ computers to facilitate in controlling and monitoring these complex systems. And, in order to maintain the complex control systems, human interfaces were developed to allow the human labor force to interact with the machines.
Human/machine interfaces (HMIs) or simply user interfaces are important to the successful operation and maintenance of industrial automation devices and equipment. User interfaces provide the essential communication link between operators and automation devices. This link allows operators to, among other things, setup devices, monitor device status during operation, as well as analyze device health. Without such user interfaces, high level industrial automation would be difficult if not impossible to achieve.
Despite the increased control that HMI devices afford, there still is little in the way of efficiently locating specific bits of data and/or data related to specific events. If an operator desires to review historical data, for example, around a specific event, they must retrieve data for a specified period and review the data in totality to determine if their specific data is included. This can be extremely time consuming and can lead to missed data that may be extremely relevant. The amount of manufacturing process information is also on the rise as more complex machines are utilized in the manufacturing processes. Thus, the amount of data to peruse by an operator or maintenance personnel constantly increases while the means to find and retrieve the data has done little to keep up with the staggering amounts of information.